David Clyde balks at the suggestion that he once saved the Texas Rangers. “You can’t say that I saved the franchise,” he counters in his South Texas drawl. “Because in the entire history of Major League Baseball — and I don’t think I’m wrong on this — there has never been a franchise that has folded. They have moved, but (the league has) never had one put on their door, ‘going out of business’. So, I cannot take credit for that.

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“Now, (if) we want to rephrase that and say I had a big hand in keeping baseball in Arlington? I will agree to that.” 

Clyde is 63 years old now, and more than 45 years after his big-league debut, he is hoping that the Rangers — or MLB, or the Players Association, or anyone, really — will consider returning the favor. He is one of around 640 players who, by virtue of a bit of red tape, some technicalities and one incredibly ill-conceived lawsuit, are without a pension or access to MLB’s health insurance program as they hit retirement age.

A 2011 concession by the commissioner’s office did grant the players some financial reprieve in the form of non-pension payments that, in some cases, are equivalent to the lower end of a pension payment. Yet Clyde and others believe the majors and the MLBPA could be doing more to take care of a generation of players who are entering their vulnerable late years.

After owner Bob Short moved the Washington Senators to Texas and they became the Rangers in 1972, the team (to put it politely) struggled mightily, both on the field and off. Not only did they go 54-100 in their inaugural season in Arlington, but attendance languished at 8,610 fans per game, fifth-worst in baseball.

Texas needed a franchise-rescuing turnaround, and June 5, 1973 promised one in the form of the first overall pick of the draft. With that selection — passing up such future stars as Robin Yount, Dave Winfield and Fred Lynn — the Rangers chose a left-handed pitching phenom from Westchester High School in Houston. David Clyde had just completed an absolutely legendary senior season, cruising to an 18-0 record (including one stretch of five games that contained three no-hitters and two one-hitters) and stacking up 328 strikeouts against just 18 walks in 148⅓ innings.

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David Clyde was supposed to be the player who carried the Texas Rangers into relevance. It just wasn’t supposed to begin or end quite so suddenly.

With Texas floundering in both performance and attendance, Short made an irresponsible and short-sighted decision: Rather than allow Clyde to develop in the minors, he brought the 18-year-old southpaw directly to the big leagues. Just 22 days after being drafted, Clyde made his debut at Arlington Stadium in front of a franchise-record-breaking 35,698 fans, who also got to see “Polynesian belly dancers, lions and a papier-mâché giraffe¹” as part of the promotion.

Clyde’s solid performance that night probably made things worse for him in the long term. The plan had reportedly been to let Clyde start a game or two as a publicity stunt, then send him to the minors. But not only did the 18-year-old pitch five innings of one-hit (albeit seven-walk) baseball that night — picking up a win over Jim Kaat, Rod Carew and the Minnesota Twins — but with the record-breaking crowd, Short insisted that Clyde be kept in the big leagues. For the rest of the 1973 season, the Rangers drew an average of 7,604 fans on days when David Clyde didn’t start and 17,891 on days when he did.

Even the short-term ploy faded by season’s end, however. A mere 2,513 fans turned out to watch the Rangers notch their 100th loss of the 1973 season in Clyde’s next-to-last start of the year. Perhaps predictably, the attendance wasn’t the only thing that began to wane. By season’s end, Clyde had a 4-8 record with a 5.01 ERA.

By 1975, he was back in Double A, never to pitch for the Rangers again. Before the 1978 season, he was traded to Cleveland and, on Aug. 7, 1979, he hit Carl Yastrzemski with his final big-league pitch. Short-term minor-league stints with the Rangers and Astros resulted only in more injuries and poor results. His career was over by 1981.

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By then, Bob Short had long since cashed out. With the team no longer on the verge of insolvency, he had sold the Rangers in May 1974.

How different would the Rangers teams of the late 1970s and early ’80s have been if they’d waited and brought up a fully polished, confident left-handed starter? The David Clyde saga sits atop a long list of “what ifs” that speckle the franchise’s history.

But there is another unfortunate aspect of the story. When Clyde finally retired, he was only 37 service-time days short of a milestone — four years on a big-league roster. Had he made it to four years, he would have qualified for the majors’ pension plan.

It gets worse: Even with all the mismanagement, if his career had started and ended only one year later, he would have gotten nearly a full pension, anyway. Why? Clyde’s last big-league pitch came in 1979, mere months before a collective bargaining win for the MLBPA in 1980 that has benefited a generation of players since.

In 1980, with the players on the verge of a strike, the league acquiesced to a few demands — including a change in the pension plan. Previously, players needed to accrue a full four years on a big-league roster to be eligible for the pension. In the new agreement, while four years was still the mark for a full pension, any player who managed to stay on a big-league roster for even 43 days would be eligible to receive a partial pension. Additionally, any player who spent even one day on a big-league roster would be eligible to buy into the majors’ health insurance plan.

Unfortunately for players like Clyde, however, whose service time came between the introduction of the pension plan (1947) and 1979, these terms were not applied retroactively. So, even though Clyde pitched in the big leagues for almost four years, not only does he not receive a pension, he is also ineligible to buy into the majors’ health insurance plan. He’s not the only one. While the original number of players who fell into Clyde’s category was around 1,800, there are now roughly 640 players remaining, according to Douglas J. Gladstone, who wrote a book on the topic in 2010.

Reliever Jeff Terpko (who was once traded for himself) was a teammate of Clyde’s on the 1974 Rangers, and his early years in baseball were jostled off track by a few circumstances beyond his control.

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“My mother got sick at the end of the season in ’71,” Terpko recalls. “I started out in Triple A when I was 18 years old in 1969. And then when I got out of that season, I had to go six months active duty in the military. I got back and missed spring training. So they sent me to Double A, and I didn’t have a very good year. And then, my mother got sick and for the next two years, I think it was…” he trails off for a moment.

“I dunno. I just couldn’t get my feet on the ground.” 

Terpko sat out the 1973 season, but — at the order of his mother, who had by this time been diagnosed with cancer — he returned to the game in 1974 and found himself in the big leagues by season’s end, with a 1.29 ERA in three games. He spent the following season back in Triple A. But in 1976, he was a major contributor to the Rangers’ bullpen, going 3-3 with a 2.39 ERA in 52⅔ innings. He was traded to the Expos the following year, and his career sputtered. 

“Well, I actually injured my shoulder during the season with Montreal,” Terpko explains from his Pennsylvania home, having turned 68 years old in October. “I severed a nerve in my neck, and it’s the nerve that ran down into your shoulder blade, and my muscle atrophied in my shoulder blade, and I lost my …” he pauses, trying to find the right words. “… I just never got back.”

All told, Terpko had nearly two years of service time. Shortly after he retired, in addition to his own medical bills, his wife became ill. She battled for 25 years before passing away in 2014. Terpko has gone bankrupt twice since retirement.

“You know, I never heard a peep,” Terpko says of MLB and the MLBPA’s involvement after his retirement. “I didn’t expect anything, but you never heard a peep. After playing 11 years of professional baseball, you never heard a peep on ‘How you doin’?’ or “Is everything okay?’ or anything. Well, it wasn’t.”

“The first several years I played, the minimum salary was $10,000,” says Tom Grieve. Grieve played for the Senators and Rangers from 1970-77, then eventually became the general manager before settling into his current role as a television analyst. “A good number of players … were making a salary that was very similar to a schoolteacher or a fireman. We weren’t complaining; we were happy to earn that amount of money, but … adding up the minor-league and the major-league time, if you had any kind of career, you’re 28 to 32 years old. (Then) you’re going to start another career without a college education, 10 to 12 years behind everybody else, and you hadn’t made any money, anyway! So, you gotta have something to show for it.”

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I asked Grieve if, during his time as a general manager, there was ever any consideration of putting Clyde on a big-league roster for 37 days, just to allow him to qualify.

“No, there was never any thought to call up any player who didn’t merit being on the big-league team for that reason,” Grieve said. “I think you just start something that may never end with all the players, and it just wasn’t something that was feasible. I think if you did start doing that, the commissioner, for the good of the game, would probably come up with some kind of a decision that disallowed that … With a lot of respect to the players that were involved. Joe Lovitto was a teammate of mine, a good friend of mine. Joe was in the same position — might have had fewer days to go than David Clyde.”

Lovitto died of cancer in 2001 at the age of 50.

“Knowing what we know today, we probably would have told the Rangers not to bother [drafting me],” Clyde says of his time in Texas. “But back then, that wasn’t something you did. Really, this is more of an issue concerning MLB — or not so much MLB, but the Players’ Association.”

To what does Clyde attribute the long wait from 1980-2011, and the disagreement between the two sides on what would constitute a fair compromise?

“Greed,” says Clyde, letting the word hang in the air for a few seconds before continuing. “What else could it be? The pension fund is worth in excess of two billion dollars. So, they’re very solvent. And they don’t hesitate to point out what they do for a lot of people. That’s good that they do it for a lot of people, but what about taking care of your own?”

Neither MLB nor the MLBPA is legally required to provide these players with anything. Unless both sides explicitly specify otherwise, collective bargaining agreements — by law — can not be applied retroactively. MLB has, since 1980, been within its legal rights to throw up its hands and say, in effect, Sorry about your luck.

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In fact, though, baseball has taken steps on a number of occasions to provide some modicum of financial security for its alumni as they approach retirement age. First, there’s the Baseball Assistance Team (or B.A.T.).

“Formed in 1986 by a group of former Major League Baseball players, B.A.T. was founded to confidentially help members of the Baseball Family who were in need of assistance with nowhere else to turn,” says the About section of the foundation’s website. “In 1991, a one-time contribution was jointly made by Major League Baseball, the Major League Baseball Players Association and the Gannett-affiliated Freedom Foundation to establish an endowment for B.A.T. The charitable organization was not intended to take the place of a pension or to serve as one. The intention was to serve as a bridge to help people get back on their feet. The organization has changed slightly since 1986 but one thing has not changed: If a member of the Baseball Family is in need of medical, financial or psychological assistance, B.A.T. will do all it can to help.^2“

The league took further steps in 1990, when — at the behest of Early Wynn — MLB began paying full pensions to the widows of vested big-leaguers (it had previously been half). Three years later, 34 members of the Negro Leagues and their spouses were granted lifetime health insurance benefits³. In 1997, the big-league office took the further conciliatory step of offering payments — between $7,500 and $10,000 per year — for players who played in the Negro Leagues before MLB was integrated in 1947. Seven years later, in 2004, they expanded the program to include all years before full integration in 1959. For those who had played four years in the Negro Leagues but had never made it to MLB, a choice was given: $4,500 per year for the rest of their life, or $10,000 per year for four years.

1997 was also the year in which MLB opted to make another aspect of the pension program retroactive: All MLB players who played before the pension program was introduced in 1947 — assuming they had at least five years’ service time — would be given $2,500 per quarter, or $10,000 per year.

In the immediate aftermath of those conciliatory steps, the 1947-79 players seemed to be next in line for the next show of goodwill by MLB. While both the MLBPA and the commissioner’s office acknowledged the need to address that group of players, they hoped to do so without the case being taken to court. Unfortunately, in 2003, an ill-advised lawsuit tossed that hope into a legal muck-bucket, setting proceedings back by nearly a decade.

The suit, brought by former White Sox catcher Mike Colbern, made the allegation that MLB was violating Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by finding a way to make payments to Negro League players while ignoring the primarily Caucasian players who made up the group in question. Predictably, the court ruled against the players. While it’s reasonable to think it unfair that one group was given something by the sport while another was ignored, to argue that the decision was a case of racial inequality against Caucasian players was doomed from the get-go, especially since some of the 1947-79 players were themselves African-American or Latino.

Be that as it may, the league did partially relent in 2011⁴: For every 43 days a ’47-’79 player had spent on a big-league roster, he would receive a stipend of $625 per year, to be paid out of baseball’s competitive balance tax. That means that someone like Clyde, who fell just short of the four-year mark, receives $8,750 per year (or $6,262 after taxes), while someone who barely eked out the current 43-day minimum mark would receive $625 pre-tax dollars per year.

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How does that compare to an actual pension plan? It’s complicated, but using Clyde as an example, we can piece it together. Baseball’s explanation of its pension plan (found here) is 128 pages long, but contained within is a series of charts that explain what each player can expect to receive. With Clyde falling just 37 days short of four years, he was 94.6 percent of the way there.

Thus, extrapolating from the chart, if he had played his final game in 1980 rather than 1979, he would be receiving between $7,574.76 per year (if he retired at 45) and $27,638.40 (if he retired at 62). His payments of $8,750 per year do fall within that range, albeit near the bottom of the spectrum.

“We are getting a small benefit now,” Clyde says, “but we laid a lot on the line so that these guys can have what they have today. We were told all along that today’s player is aware of it. Yet when I talk to current players on occasion, they have no idea what I’m talking about.”

In matters of fairness, it’s easy to reach a conclusion when a story falls into one of two categories: Either a clear injustice that demands an obvious solution (as in the case of Micah Bowie, who — falling 20 days short of four years’ service time — has been denied disability aid by the MLBPA), or an issue of sour grapes that has already been handled in a satisfactory matter by the powers that be. This case seems to land somewhere in between. Yes, MLB and the MLBPA let these players wait for over 30 years while others were given some form of financial aid. But since 2011, payments have been made that are at least on the spectrum of what a pension might pay.

Could the league and the association do more? Legally speaking, they certainly don’t have to. But given the ever-shrinking number of players affected and the relatively cheap cost of assistance, it seems like an opportunity to do some good, not to mention a public relations win.

One possible compromise would be for the MLBPA and the commissioner’s office to allow these players to do something that every player who has spent even one day on a big-league roster since 1980 has been eligible for, but these players are not: Buy into baseball’s health insurance program⁵.

But, as Clyde and Grieve both made clear in our conversations, the ability to buy into that program is dependent on a player’s ability to pay. For those like Terpko who have faced dire financial circumstances, it wouldn’t be of much help at all.

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So perhaps the answer is to put each of the players on the same plan as those pre-integration Negro Leagues players, or the pre-1947 players with five years’ service time: An annual payment of $10,000. If 640 is indeed an accurate tally for the number of surviving players, that would add up to $6.4 million in 2019 — or a $213,333.33 check from each of MLB’s 30 clubs, at least for the time being.

“The thing is, it’s not a perpetual amount that goes in every year,” Grieve says. “Eventually, there’s not going to be any of them left! It’s a dwindling number (of players) every year … You know, when you’re struggling financially — take all the 800,000 federal workers who have struggled for the last month — they’re talking about a rent payment, which for some of them is probably between $500 and $800. So, if you got (even) $5,000 coming in, that makes a huge difference.”

¹ “The rise … and fall of a phenom“, Jeff Merron, ESPN.com, 2003 

² Terpko, for his part, says he had been made only vaguely aware of B.A.T., and would look into applying for one of their grants

³ “Negro Leaguers to Get Their Share“, Gregory Lewis, South Florida Sun-Sentinel, May 18, 2004

⁴ Note that these payments were not legally defined as “pensions,” since those could be passed to surviving spouses upon death, but “supplemental benefit plans.” When the player dies, the payments stop. 

⁵ One example: Corey Lee, who faced a total of six hitters in his only big-league appearance, was eligible to buy into the majors’ health insurance program while players like Clyde and Terpko are not.

(Top photo of Clyde: Focus on Sport/Getty Images)